I'm on freakin edge right now. I don't feel like it is healthy for me to live at home. This has always been the case. Whether it be because of my parents arguing, Anh, OR Xuan, I can't stand to live at home. My family is highly unusual. Highly neurotic. Everyone has their own fucken problem.

Xuan is too damn judgmental for her own good. She looks at everything with a super critical eye, as if her opinion is what is always the right one or the best one. As if everyone has to listen to her and everything has to go her way. She likes to be bossy, she has to have things done her way. She can never be wrong. She doesn't like to step down even when she is wrong. She's not open-minded enough.

The type of person that I am is selfless. I try to view everything with an open-minded. Sometimes I'm too damn open-minded to know what I really feel or know who I am. I cave in to pressure, and when people think I am a horrible person for the decisions I make, I crumble.

I don't know where to start. I think that I've bottled up these feelings for so long that I've become incapable of expressing these feelings accurately anymore. Or that, in putting these emotions into words, I can't because I've lost the passion behind what I have to say. All I know is that I am unhappy.

When it comes to Dan, I can find a million things wrong with him. It's difficult to not be critical when it seems like everything seems to be wrong... Everything. He is just not a good boyfriend. And that's why I continuously get hurt. It's a never-ending process. That is, until I end the relationship. I don't wholeheartedly believe that this is just a matter of different definitions of relationships. It's much more than that. It really is an issue of caring or not caring, and not just different definitions of relationships because he simply didn't care to make me feel better when he knew I was upset, or even figure out why I was down yesterday. If it was truly that reason, why would he change his level of affection when we are in private and when we are in public. Yesterday, the entire day I was with him (with his brother), he was disconnected, unaffectionate, but as soon as we left his house while we were in his car alone, he reached over and grabbed my hand. And even leaned over for a smooch. I don't think love comes that easily young man. I don't think you can just ignore the emotional needs of your partner one minute, and selfishly ask for your own to be fullfilled the next just like that, and expect everything to be okay. Things are not okay, but you are too ignorant to know otherwise.

What makes it even worse is when you ignore the problems and pretend like nothing's wrong. That just irks me even more. He doesn't know how to be a boyfriend. And maybe it's time I tell him that it's over. That I've emotionally checked out. That I don't love him anymore. That he doesn't make me feel loved. That sometimes goodbye is a second chance.

I haven't been able to be myself in this relationship with Dan. I haven't been able to be happy about myself. Happy that he is my boyfriend. He doesn't inspire me to be the best that I can be. Why is that? Because I disagree with so many things that he does. I see them all as mistakes. Even the decision he made with his brother yesterday to fool his mother into thinking they bought a cheap H&M dress shirt was something I thought was immature and foolish of him. I wish I could be a bossier girlfriend. I wish he was scared of me. That he loved me enough to cater to my needs. But I'm simply not that type of girl...

Or am I? Should I be?

He tells me he loves me but I don't believe one ounce of it. Someone who loved me would've been different. Would've been able to read me so easily. Would've paid attention to my needs. This isn't even a matter of me not knowing what his needs are. My emotional needs aren't being met. How can I NOT be upset. How can I NOT be unhappy. I am so ready to blow this relationship off. We are not compatible with each other.

He fucken takes me for granted.

It disgusted me that after all that was happening yesterday, he actually thought that there as a chance of cuddling last night. That after yesterday, he could put my emotions on ignore, and think I would want to kiss him just because he leaned in for one. What are you, a fool?

And when I tell you "nothing's wrong", everything is wrong. You are too damn stupid to realize that.

I don't like a boyfriend who says stupid things without thinking. Who is addicted to facebook and does everything on facebook and not worry about more important things. I don't want a boyfriend who takes this long to understand his girlfriend. Florence is right. The longer I hang on, the more I am hurting the relationship. The more I will end up hurting him.

Here's a song I dedicate to him:

Foolish Games

You took your coat off and stood in the rain,
You're always crazy like that.
And I watched from my window,
Always felt I was outside looking in on you.
You're always the mysterious one with
Dark eyes and careless hair,
You were fashionably sensitive
But too cool to care.
You stood in my doorway, with nothing to say
Besides some comment on the weather.

Well in case you failed to notice,
In case you failed to see,
This is my heart bleeding before you,
This is me down on my knees, and...


These foolish games are tearing me apart,
And your thoughtless words are breaking my heart.
You're breaking my heart.
You're always brilliant in the morning,
Smoking your cigarettes and talking over coffee.
Your philosophies on art, Baroque moved you.
You loved Mozart and you'd speak of your loved ones
As I clumsily strummed my guitar.
You'd teach me of honest things,
Things that were daring, things that were clean.
Things that knew what an honest dollar did mean.
I hid my soiled hands behind my back.
Somewhere along the line, I must've gone
Off track with you.


Well, excuse me, guess I've mistaken you for somebody else,
Somebody who gave a damn,
Somebody more like myself.


You took your coat off,
Stood in the rain,
You're always crazy like that.
Somebody more like myself

Dan is a bad boyfriend. That's honestly what I want to tell him, straight to his face. How does he sleep at night, knowing that his girlfriend was upset about something, and isn't concerned enough to figure why she is hurt, or why she is even covering the pain up.

I have never met a man who didn't want to be loved. But I have seldom met a man who didn't fear marriage. Something about the closure seems constricting, not enabling. Marriage seems easier to understand for what it cuts out of our lives than for what it makes possible within our lives.

When I was younger this fear immobilized me. I did not want to make a mistake. I saw my friends get married for reasons of social acceptability, or sexual fever, or just because they thought it was the logical thing to do. Then I watched, as they and their partners became embittered and petty in their dealings with each other. I looked at older couples and saw, at best, mutual toleration of each other. I imagined a lifetime of loveless nights and bickering and could not imagine subjecting myself or someone else to such a fate.

And yet, on rare occasions, I would see old couples who somehow seemed to glow in each other's presence. They seemed really in love, not just dependent upon each other and tolerant of each other's foibles. It was an astounding sight, and it seemed impossible. How, I asked myself, can they have survived so many years of sameness, so much irritation at the other's habits? What keeps love alive in them, when most of us seem unable to even stay together, much less love each other? The central secret seems to be in
choosing well. There is something to the claim of fundamental compatibility. Good people can create a bad relationship, even though they both dearly want the relationship to succeed. It is important to find someone with whom you can create a good relationship from the outset. Unfortunately, it is hard to see clearly in the early stages.

Sexual hunger draws you to each other and colors the way you see yourselves together. It blinds you to the thousands of little things by which relationships eventually survive or fail. You need to find a way to see beyond this initial overwhelming sexual fascination.
Some people choose to involve themselves sexually and ride out the most heated period of sexual attraction in order to see what is on the other side. This can work, but it can also
leave a trail of wounded hearts. Others deny the sexual side altogether in an attempt to get to know each other apart from their sexuality. But they cannot see clearly, because the presence of unfulfilled sexual desire looms so large that it keeps them from having any normal perception of what life would be like together. The truly lucky people are the ones who manage to become long- time friends before they realize they are attracted to each other. They get to know each other's laughs, passions, sadness, and fears. They see each other at their worst and at their best. They share time together before they get swept into the entangling intimacy of their sexuality.

This is the ideal, but not often possible. If you fall under the spell of your sexual attraction immediately, you need to look beyond it for other keys to compatibility. One of these is laughter. Laughter tells you how much you will enjoy each other's company over the long term. If your laughter together is good and healthy, and not at the expense of others, then you have a healthy relationship to the world. Laughter is the child of surprise. If you can make each other laugh, you can always surprise each other. And if you can
always surprise each other, you can always keep the world around you new. Beware of a relationship in which there is no laughter. Even the most intimate relationships based only on seriousness have a tendency to turn sour. Over time, sharing a common serious viewpoint on the world tends to turn you against those who do not share the same
viewpoint, and your relationship can become based on being critical together.

After laughter, look for a partner who deals with the world in a way you respect. When two people first get together, they tend to see their relationship as existing only in the space between the two of them. They find each other endlessly fascinating, and the overwhelming power of the emotions they are sharing obscures the outside world. As the
relationship ages and grows, the outside world becomes important again. If your partner treats people or circumstances in a way you can't accept, you will inevitably come to grief. Look at the way she cares for others and deals with the daily affairs of life. If that makes you love her more, your love will grow. If it does not, be careful. If you do not respect the way you each deal with the world around you, eventually the two of you will not respect each other.

Look also at how your partner confronts the mysteries of life. We live on the cusp of poetry and practicality, and the real life of the heart resides in the poetic. If one of you is deeply affected by the mystery of the unseen in life and relationships, while the other is drawn only to the literal and the practical, you must take care that the distance doesn't become an unbridgeable gap that leaves you each feeling isolated and misunderstood.

There are many other keys, but you must find them by yourself. We all have unchangeable parts of our hearts that we will not betray and private commitments to a vision of life that we will not deny. If you fall in love with someone who cannot nourish those inviolable parts of you, or if you cannot nourish them in her, you will find yourselves growing further apart until you live in separate worlds where you share the business of life, but never touch each other where the heart lives and dreams. From there it is only a small leap to the cataloging of petty hurts and daily failures that leaves so many couples bitter and unsatisfied with their mates.

So choose carefully and well. If you do, you will have chosen a partner with whom you can grow, and then the real miracle of marriage can take place in your hearts. I pick my words carefully when I speak of a miracle. But I think it is not too strong a word. There is a miracle in marriage. It is called transformation. Transformation is one of the most common events of nature. The seed becomes the flower. The cocoon becomes the butterfly. Winter becomes spring and love becomes a child. We never question these, because we see them around us every day. To us they are not miracles, though if we did not know them they would be impossible to believe. Marriage is a transformation we choose to make. Our love is planted like a seed, and in time it begins to flower. We cannot know the flower that will blossom, but we can be sure that a bloom will come. If you have chosen carefully and wisely, the bloom will be good. If you have chosen poorly or for the wrong reason, the bloom will be flawed. We are quite willing to accept the reality of negative transformation in a marriage. It was negative transformation that always had me terrified of the bitter marriages that I feared when I was younger. It never occurred to me to question the dark miracle that transformed love into harshness and
bitterness. Yet I was unable to accept the possibility that the first heat of love could be
transformed into something positive that was actually deeper and more meaningful than the heat of fresh passion. All I could believe in was the power of this passion and the fear that when it cooled I would be left with something lesser and bitter. But there is positive transformation as well. Like negative transformation, it results from a slow accretion of little things. But instead of death by a thousand blows, it is growth by a thousand touches of love. Two histories intermingle. Two separate beings, two separate presence, two
separate consciousnesses come together and share a view of life that passes before them. They remain separate, but they also become one. There is an expansion of awareness, not a closure and a constriction, as I had once feared. This is not to say that there is not tension and there are not traps. Tension and traps are part of every choice of life, from celibate to monogamous to having multiple lovers. Each choice contains within it the lingering doubt that the road not taken somehow more fruitful and exciting, and each becomes dulled to the richness that it alone contains. But only marriage allows life to deepen and expand and be leavened by the knowledge that two have chosen, against all odds, to become one. Those who live together without marriage can know the pleasure of shared company, but there is a specific gravity in the marriage commitment that deepens that experience into something richer and more complex.

So do not fear marriage, just as you should not rush into it for the wrong reasons. It is an act of faith and it contains within it the power of transformation.

If you believe in your heart that you have found someone with whom you are able to grow, if you have sufficient faith that you can resist the endless attraction of the road not taken and the partner not chosen, if you have the strength of heart to embrace the cycles and seasons that your love will experience, then you may be ready to seek
the miracle that marriage offers. If not, then wait. The easy grace of a marriage well made is worth your patience. When the time comes, a thousand flowers will bloom...endlessly.

Alright, it's time to focus. My last semester is starting in just a couple days. I'm pretty much already going to start working full-time as a college graduate in the real world. What do I want to do with myself? Where do I see myself and where do I want to be headed? What kind of woman do I want to become?

It's amazing how fast time flies. And even more amazing the wonderful things God has blessed me with over these past few years as well as my entire life. I couldn't be more grateful for all the opportunities and experiences I have been fortunate enough to experience, and I thank God for a wonderful, loving companion through it all (Dan). He really is amazing.

I remember when I used to be *benignly* jealous of the select people I noticed who was so lucky to have an unconditional loving relationship with a companion-of-a-boyfriend. I remember I was envious of such people like Zeynep, or Wendy. And other people who seemed to take their companion for granted, like Xuan, or Maily. And then there were those people (like me) who deserved a loving, affectionate relationship and waited for years on end until they would finally meet their match (like Florence, and My-le, etc.). Some people have it handed to them, some people have to work for it. What am I saying, I forgot that my whole point was actually to say that just a few years ago, I would've never thought I would be in this state. And after all that I've been through, I do feel blessed. :)